JANUARY 15: Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891)
Once upon a time long ago, in a place far away from here (in high school), I was a total science nerd and was planning on becoming an astrophysicist. That obviously didn’t happen, and I could go on and on about the place granted to women in the field of sciences, and especially in theoretical sciences such as math, but it boils down to: it’s not that they don’t exist, it’s that their stories are dismissed or erased. But this trend is changing (go see Hidden Figures if you haven’t already), and we’re bringing our own contribution today by telling you about about Sofia Kovalevskaya, Russian math whiz from the 19th century.
Sofia Kovalevskaya had a short but remarkable life as she overcame the prejudices of her time regarding women’s education. She had a lifelong interest in women’s rights – and her sister was the feminist and revolutionary socialist Anne Jaclard. Sofia developed very early on a flair for mathematics: the story goes that when she was 11, she had the walls of her nursery papered with pages of Ostrogradski's lecture notes on differential and integral analysis (you can’t really go much more full-on nerd than that). In her autobiography, she wrote of this precocious introduction to math:
The meaning of these concepts I naturally could not yet grasp, but they acted on my imagination, instilling in me a reverence for mathematics as an exalted and mysterious science which opens up to its initiates a new world of wonders, inaccessible to ordinary mortals.
She had plans to continue studying math at university, but there was one problem: in Russia at the time, young women could neither attend university, nor travel without permission from their father or husband. So she entered a marriage of convenience with a young paleontology student (Vladimir Kovalevsky, who would notably go on to work with Darwin). In 1869, they arrived in Heidelberg, Germany, but another problem came up there: women weren’t allowed to enroll in courses (sounds familiar?). Sofia was having none of that, so she lobbied the university’s authorities and eventually was granted permission to attend courses in math & physics, albeit unofficially.
The rest of her academic career was in the same spirit: her genius was recognized by many, she had papers published in prestigious journals, and she became the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate – in math, summa cum laude, from the University of Göttingen. Bypassing the usual required lectures and exams, she presented three papers which were deemed worthy of a doctorate: one on partial differential equations, which led to the Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem, one on the dynamics of Saturn's rings, and one on elliptic integrals. On the other hand, even with such a degree, it took her a long time to find employment, and her gender often worked as an obstacle in her career. In 1883, however, she became a privat-docent at Stockholm University and from there on, worked her way up the ranks, until 1889 when she was appointed a professor (she was the 3rd woman to hold a chair at a European university). During her time in Sweden, Sofia won several important prizes for her work, including the Prix Bordin, and in 1889, thanks to the influence of fellow Russian mathematician Chebyshev, she was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences.
Also while in Sweden, Sofia met the Swedish author Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler. While each was married and/or had strong relationships with men, the two shared a (very) close friendship (gal pals!) until Sofia’s death. They notably wrote plays in collaboration (since Sofia also had literary interests) and Anne Charlotte wrote an actual biography of Sofia in 1892, as a complement to Sofia’s autobiography, Nihilist Girl (1890). ‘Literary partnership’ – so that’s how they used to call it back in the day.
Her legacy subsists in many ways. In the scientific world, the Association for Women in Mathematics launched Sonya Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day, a program that funds workshops across the US to encourage girl to explore math. The AWM also sponsors the annual Sonya Kovalevsky Lecture, which highlights significant contributions of women in the fields of applied or computational mathematics. Every two years, the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) bestows the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award to promising young researchers. And Sofia even has a lunar crater and an asteroid named in her honor (wlw really are out of this world).
